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Ever had a hankering to own the sun, the moon, and the stars? That would indeed be a tall order however, CryDev member cwright has given us the sky. While there are a ton of tutorials in various mediums on the web that will show you how to make a skybox, they all share one commonality you have to do much of the assembly work yourself. cwright's SkyBox tool takes the frustrating parts of that process and reduces them to a few simple button clicks. Keep in mind that while this tool takes a great number of the assembly steps out of the process it will require a third party paint tool such as Photoshop or Paint Shop to manipulate the textures. If you do not have a legal copy of these you can always use My Paint or Gimp (links below) to get the job done which is what I used. With an artistic eye and some creative use of the smudge and clone stamp tools you can get your skybox textures to blend just right.

This is main and only UI. The instruction on how to use the tool are contained in a rich text document included in the Skybox zip download. Cwright covers using the tutorial images to create a skybox as well as a tutorial on creating a "New" skybox from scratch.

The tool will tie all five sky graphics of your choice together and give you a full texture to manipulate in your graphics editor of choice.

Once you have gone through the process a few times and refined your sky-box the tool will with a couple of clicks make your sky-box game ready.

This is a great tool once you get the hang of it, SkyBox 1.04 will be a huge time saver. With much of the tedium taken out of creating your sky-boxes you are free to let your imagination run wild and get as creative with your skies as you like. Until next time...

Thanks for the comments everybody, and to The Ebb for the news post.As I mentioned in the original thread, I have found one problem. When the final textures are created Skybox then converts to .dds format and places them in the game directory so they're ready for use. Unfortunately it seems that texconv.exe only works if the DirectX SDK is installed. You can install the SDK but it's a 600 Mb download..Fortunately Skybox saves the final textures in the main Skybox directory in .bmp format ( named box_12.bmp, box_34.bmp and box_5.bmp). You can then use any suitable tool (e.g. DDS Converter 2) to convert to dds format and copy into the game directory.Regards,Chris

I did install DirectX SDK, but still it still appeared "Error-Fiiled to create.dds file." on STATUSIt did create dds files in Skybox directory, I copy all three dds files into game directory, but it pop up a autoASM window "run-time error 76, Path not found"when i click CREATE MATERIAL Button.

What could went wrong? Is it any possibility the CRY ENGINE DIRECTORY path went wrong?

I did install DirectX SDK, but still it still appeared "Error-Fiiled to create.dds file." on STATUSIt did create dds files in Skybox directory, I copy all three dds files into game directory, but it pop up a autoASM window "run-time error 76, Path not found"when i click CREATE MATERIAL Button.

What could went wrong? Is it any possibility the CRY ENGINE DIRECTORY path went wrong?

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